Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

The Survival Problem: Why We Still Starve Amidst Abundance

Here’s a statistic that should make you throw your phone across the room: in 2024, we wasted over 1 billion meals per day while 673 million people went hungry. Not because we lacked food—we threw away a fifth of everything we produced—but because our distribution software was written before anyone imagined the internet.

Welcome to the Survival Problem: humanity’s longest-running bug report, filed approximately 300,000 years ago and still marked “open.”

The Absurdity of Artificial Scarcity

Let’s run the numbers, because the math is almost comically damning.

831 million people currently live in extreme poverty—roughly one in ten humans on Earth. 318 million people are homeless, while 2.8 billion lack adequate housing. 4.6 billion people—more than half of humanity—can’t access essential health services.

Meanwhile, we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. We have more empty homes than homeless people in most developed countries. We spend over $2 trillion annually on military hardware while ending extreme poverty would cost approximately $67 billion per year—roughly what Americans spend on their pets.

The Survival Problem isn’t a resource problem. It’s a routing problem. We have the packages; we just can’t figure out where to deliver them.

The Historic Hostage Situation

For most of human history, this made a kind of brutal sense. Resources were scarce. Food spoiled. Transportation was slow. Hoarding was rational when the alternative was starvation. The “work-or-die” operating system evolved because, well, if you didn’t work, you died. Simple. Effective. Terrifying.

This arrangement created what economists politely call “labor market incentives” and what the rest of us call “existential terror as a motivational tool.” Your continued existence was held hostage to your productive output. Want to eat? Prove your worth. Want shelter? Demonstrate utility. The Survival Problem wasn’t a bug—it was a feature, ensuring bodies showed up to fields and factories.

The philosopher Amartya Sen, in his landmark work Development as Freedom (1999), reframed poverty not as a lack of resources but as a lack of capabilities—the freedom to live a life you have reason to value. By this measure, billions remain imprisoned not by nature’s limits but by our collective failure of imagination.

The Three Technological Jailbreaks

Here’s where the plot thickens: three simultaneous technological revolutions are making artificial scarcity increasingly difficult to maintain.

The Brain (AI): Large Language Models are improving at roughly 100x annually in compute efficiency. Tasks that cost $100 to generate last year cost $1 today. Intelligence—once humanity’s scarcest and most expensive resource—is becoming a utility. Genius on tap.

The Body (Robotics): Humanoid robots like 1X Neo now retail for $499/month, less than minimum wage for a week. When a robot costs $3 an hour to operate, never sleeps, and never asks for healthcare, the economic logic of human labor doesn’t just weaken—it collapses like a folding chair at a sumo convention.

The Fuel (Fusion Energy): In December 2022, the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition. The fuel is deuterium, found abundantly in seawater. Once you build the reactor, the “fuel” is effectively free—the ocean becomes an infinite gas station.

Combined, these technologies are doing to scarcity what the printing press did to the scribal monopoly on knowledge: making the old gatekeepers look increasingly silly.

The Cost of Everything Approaches Zero

To understand why scarcity is becoming optional, we need to crack open what things actually cost. Strip away the complexity, and the price of any physical object reduces to three variables: energy, labor, and materials.

Consider building a small housing unit today—roughly $150,000-$300,000. Where does that money go?

• ~40% to labor (humans who need to eat and pay rent)
• ~35% to materials (stuff that had to be extracted and transported)
• ~10% to energy (fuel for trucks, electricity for tools)
• ~15% to permits, profit, and overhead

Now watch what happens as each component approaches zero:

• Fusion energy → energy costs collapse
• AI and robots → labor costs collapse
• Free energy + robots → materials become infinitely recyclable

That $200,000 housing unit? In a world of robot builders and fusion power, the marginal cost approaches the price of raw atoms—pennies. We’re approaching what economists call “zero marginal cost”—where producing one more unit of something costs essentially nothing.

GPS used to be a military secret worth billions. Now it’s free, and we’d riot if someone tried to charge for it. Housing, food, and healthcare are next in line for the same treatment.

The Engineering Solution: Survival as Infrastructure

This is the radical insight at the heart of the Unscarcity framework: the Survival Problem is no longer a moral question but an engineering one.

For millennia, we debated who deserves food, shelter, and healthcare. We created elaborate systems of means-testing, work requirements, and moral judgments to determine who had earned the right to exist. We turned survival into a commodity because, well, commodities were scarce.

But when production becomes automated and energy becomes unlimited, hoarding survival resources makes about as much sense as hoarding air. The question shifts from “who deserves it?” to “how do we route it efficiently?”

The answer is what the book calls The Foundation—a symbiotic infrastructure that provides essentials unconditionally: housing, food, healthcare, education, transportation. You get these because you exist, not because you’ve proven your worth to an algorithm.

Think less “Soviet breadline” and more “really competent public library that also handles your electricity.”

Historical Precedent: This Isn’t Utopia—It’s Engineering

Skeptics will cry “impossible!” but history already ran this experiment.

For nearly a century, the Inca Empire coordinated twelve million people across some of the most challenging terrain on Earth—without markets or currency. They used a network of state-run storehouses called Qollqa that decoupled eating from harvesting. You didn’t need to sell your grain to buy your food—the system handled distribution.

More recently, consider how public goods have expanded throughout history:

• Sanitation: Once a luxury of the wealthy, now expected infrastructure in developed nations
• Electricity: Initially sold by the kilowatt to those who could afford it, now a utility
• Education: Previously reserved for elites, now considered a universal right
• Emergency Services: Fire departments used to let uninsured homes burn; now they respond regardless of payment

Each expansion was called “impossible” by the economics of its day. Each became so normalized we forget there was ever an alternative.

The Foundation simply extends this pattern to its logical conclusion: when technology makes essentials abundant, treating them as infrastructure rather than commodities isn’t idealism—it’s efficiency.

The Prerequisite for Everything Else

Here’s why solving the Survival Problem matters beyond the obvious humanitarian imperative: you cannot build a civilization of flourishing on a foundation of existential terror.

As long as survival remains contingent on productive output, every human interaction is contaminated by desperation. People stay in abusive jobs because the alternative is homelessness. They accept exploitation because the alternative is hunger. They make short-term decisions that damage long-term flourishing because surviving next month crowds out building next decade.

The Unscarcity framework addresses two fundamental problems:

1. The Survival Problem: How do we ensure everyone has enough to live with dignity?
2. The Stagnation Problem: How do we ensure people still have reasons to get out of bed?

These problems require different solutions, but they’re sequentially dependent. You cannot ethically tackle the Stagnation Problem—questions of meaning, purpose, and contribution—while people are still dying from the Survival Problem. Otherwise, “meaning” becomes just another currency of the desperate, and “merit” becomes just another lever for the powerful.

The Foundation solves the first problem. The Ascent (detailed in Chapter 2 and the Stagnation Problem article) solves the second. But the sequence matters: floor first, then ladder.

The Objection Machine

At this point, your inner skeptic is probably warming up. Let’s address the greatest hits:

“But won’t people just be lazy?”

Maybe some. But three billion years of evolutionary history suggest humans are terrible at doing nothing for extended periods. We get bored. We seek challenge. We crave contribution. Remove survival pressure, and most people don’t become vegetables—they become artists, caregivers, inventors, and parents who finally have time to raise their children.

Also: so what? If someone chooses to spend their life reading in a hammock, and that life doesn’t come at anyone else’s expense (because abundance makes it free), who are we to demand they suffer for our Protestant work ethic?

“Isn’t this just communism with better marketing?”

No. Communism was about controlling production—central planning, state ownership, bureaucratic allocation. The Foundation is about distributing abundance that already exists. There’s no central committee deciding what color shoes you wear. The infrastructure responds to demand, just like the internet does.

Think of it this way: Does anyone accuse GPS of being communist? It’s free, universal, and transformative—but no one’s lining up for breadlines to get directions.

“Who pays for this?”

Who “paid” for the air you’re breathing? The question reveals the assumption that everything must fit into exchange economics. When fusion reactors generate unlimited clean energy and robots build housing at marginal cost, “payment” becomes an accounting fiction, not a resource constraint.

The real question isn’t “who pays?” but “what’s the coordination mechanism?” And that’s an engineering problem, not a moral one.

The Transition: From Here to There

The hardest part isn’t designing the destination—it’s building the road from here.

The book’s Chapter 8 details the transition mechanism, but the core insight is this: we’re not starting from scratch. Every society already provides some baseline support—public education, emergency healthcare, roads, police. The Foundation simply expands these floors until they cover survival entirely.

The transition happens through what the framework calls Free Zones—geographic regions that prototype Foundation-level support before scaling. Think of them as special economic zones, except instead of attracting foreign capital, they attract human flourishing.

Historical precedent suggests this works: Costa Rica abolished its military in 1948 and invested the savings in education and healthcare. Singapore transformed from colonial backwater to first-world prosperity in a single generation through aggressive infrastructure investment. Estonia rebuilt itself as a digital-first society after Soviet collapse.

None of these transformations were inevitable. All of them were choices.

The Moral Reframe

Let’s be honest about what we’re actually debating when we argue about the Survival Problem.

We’re not debating whether we can end poverty, homelessness, and preventable disease—the technology and resources clearly exist. We’re debating whether we should. Whether survival is a right or a reward. Whether existence must be earned.

The Unscarcity framework takes a position: consciousness itself—the spark of subjective experience—is sufficient grounds for dignified existence. Not because of what you produce, not because of what you contribute, not because of what you might become. Simply because you are.

This is captured in the first of the Five Laws Axioms: Experience is Sacred. All conscious entities possess intrinsic worth, independent of usefulness or contribution.

From this axiom flows everything else. The Foundation isn’t charity dispensed by the productive to the undeserving. It’s infrastructure for conscious beings, as fundamental as the atmosphere.

Conclusion: The Floor That Enables the Ladder

The Survival Problem is humanity’s oldest unsolved bug—but it’s also, for the first time in 300,000 years, a solvable bug.

The technology exists. The resources exist. The historical precedents exist. What’s missing is the collective decision to stop treating survival as a scarce commodity and start treating it as abundant infrastructure.

This isn’t utopia—humans will still be petty, jealous, tribal, and prone to posting unhinged comments at 2 AM. But they’ll be petty, jealous, and tribal without the constant backdrop of existential terror. That’s progress.

Maria Delgado, the house cleaner we meet in the book’s Preamble, spends her life with knees memorizing the pattern of strangers’ bathroom tiles—not because she lacks intelligence or ambition, but because survival demands it. In the Foundation future, Maria paints. Not because paintings sell, but because a sunset made her chest ache with beauty she wanted to understand.

That’s the world we’re building. Not a world without challenges—but a world where the challenges you face are the ones you choose, not the ones inflicted by a system designed for scarcity that forgot to update its assumptions.

The Survival Problem is solved. Not through moral awakening (though that helps), not through political will alone (though that’s necessary), but through engineering reality finally catching up with our species’ oldest dream.

Floor first. Then ladder. Then stars.

References

• World Bank, 2025 Global Poverty Update
• FAO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025
• UNEP, Food Waste Index Report 2024
• WHO/World Bank, Tracking Universal Health Coverage 2025
• UN-Habitat, Global Housing Statistics
• UNU-WIDER, New Estimates of the Cost of Ending Poverty
• Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom (1999)
• UnscarcityBook, Chapter 1 (The Foundation) and Chapter 3 (The MOSAIC)